At dinnertime, my sister and I would pour him a glass of wine, and each time he lifted the glass, tears would flow as he recounted the events of those days: clearly the war should not have been lost, but it was, and the vast northeast was lost as a result. “All my comrades of those years who fought single-mindedly behind enemy lines for over a decade died in vain, and their hope that a victorious central government would look after their orphans and widows came to naught. Those who remained behind faced a difficult time living in the hands of the Communists. Patriotic intellectuals one and all, if they hadn’t become involved in the revolution, they could have survived and raised their children. I harmed them all, for which I am profoundly sorry!” He repeated such words, tormenting himself to the end of his days.
After Mother passed away, he spoke less, becoming almost silent, as if he had gone from the surge of the Great Flowing River to the Sea of Silence. At the southernmost tip of Taiwan, to the left of Oluanpi Lighthouse, there is a small bay called the Yakou Sea, or Mute Sea. The waves from the Pacific roll into this bay and seem to vanish without leaving a trace, without making a sound. It is just like the famous line from Shakespeare: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Going all day without speaking, he’d sit alone on his balcony watching for our arrival. As the days of autumn gradually grew shorter, I’d sit with him and recite “To Autumn,” the poem by Keats he so loved:
Where are the songs of spring, Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
And he asked, what of those foolish bees? We are those foolish bees, and as long as flowers bloom, summer will last forever. The poet remembers that autumn: “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Father said that the time spent in our homeland was all too brief, and I still remember all the swallow nests under the eaves of the house and how we always looked forward to their return in the spring.
On the afternoon of Father’s Day 1987, he forced himself to get up and sit in a rattan chair beside the bed, where he suddenly passed away, quietly laying aside the ideals of a lifetime as well as the struggles and the sufferings of loss. We buried his ashes next to Mother’s, facing the bowed rim of the Pacific. On this island where he lived peacefully for forty years, it doesn’t snow in the winter, it’s hot and humid in the summer, and the sun shines down fiercely on their gravestones.
Going through the things my parents left behind was a simple matter. In her entire life, my mother never possessed any jewelry, or anything of value. In her closet was a small beat-up leather suitcase that contained old photographs from Nanjing to Chongqing, from Beijing after demobilization, and from Taiwan, which she was reluctant to discard (there was not one photo of me as a child). On the top level of the closet were eight quilts. I know that after moving to Neihu, she’d often go to a quilt shop on Changsha Street in Taipei and have quilts of varying thicknesses made to order. She said, “We have our own house now and can take care of our guests when they come.” Actually, the people she had taken care of were no longer around: revolutionaries, anti-Japanese volunteers, defenders of Shanhaiguan, those who fought in the battle of Taierzhuang, and those who gave their all on the Burma Road, refugees from home, young people wandering destitute … they were all gone. I kept two of her quilts and used them for more than a decade on Lishui Street. Even that age of traditional handmade quilts is gone.
Arranging my father’s possessions was even easier. After leaving the KMT in 1954, he was always being watched. By the time Uncle Lei Zhen was arrested in 1960, my father had burned almost all his letters and papers to avoid possibly implicating others. For years afterward, he kept no letters. In a drawer in his desk, I did find a few letters from Zhang Qun, which discussed severing relations with Japan. One letter was from Yoshida Ayumi, the daughter of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, who wrote thanking my father for going to Japan and for his condolences. There was also a small wooden box containing a red wrapping cloth on which was inscribed four lines of Chinese verse, presented as a gift at the funeral ceremony. In addition, there were also a number of birthday cards depicting little cats and dogs from his grandchildren. In his bedroom, I found his diary; a twenty-volume set of Collected Philosophy (1920, hardbound edition), which he purchased in Germany; and a complete set of the Twenty-Four Histories he bought in Shanghai, which always sat on his bookshelf. After my mother died, we didn’t know if we should air his books, because they were damaged beyond repair by termites, with only half the pages and the covers remaining; the wooden box crumbled at the touch and was fit only to be burned.
After the passing of my parents, amid the complex feelings of loss, all I could do was struggle, unable to free myself from the sadness of a drifting existence he experienced, and which I had inherited. I retired early from teaching at NTU the following year—returning to the podium after the accident, I found it extremely difficult to stand for two hours and then carry my books, exam papers, and other materials after class and walk from the College of Arts to the main gate in the cold or the heat, then walk home if I was unable to get a cab on Xinsheng South Road. It was the time for me to sit down and to think and write.
CONVERSATIONS WITH CHI SHIYING
August 1990 was the third anniversary of Father’s passing. My brother and sisters authorized me to prepare a book titled Interviews with Chi Shiying and the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica to publish it. The book was part of the oral history project drawn up in 1959 by Professor Guo Ting Yi, the first director of the institute. In 1969, with the support of Shen Yunlong, my father was interviewed a total of nineteen times by Lin Quan and Lin Zhongsheng. Lin Zhongsheng transcribed the tapes and prepared the final manuscript. Although the manuscript completely preserved the original meaning of the oral narrative, sedulously avoiding embellishment, through his smooth style, Lin is able to plumb the depths of the interviewee’s complicated experience. Before and after the interviews, Lin developed a genuine interest in and sympathy for my father’s generation and ideals. He assiduously checked and verified the facts and continuously discussed and checked the names of people, places, and events with my father, resulting in a book with very few errors. After it was finished, not only did the whole academic community recognize its value but also general readers enjoyed Lin Zhongsheng’s sprightly, clear, and spot-on prose, and found the rich content of great interest.
Mr. Lin Zhongsheng was born in Yilan and graduated from the History Department of National Taiwan Normal University. He was only twenty-eight when he conducted the interviews with my father and displayed a genuine bent for historical research. Later he operated a large-scale cram school, which was tremendously successful. He founded the Lamp of Wisdom Advanced Middle School for the education of the children of his hometown. With his own funds and energy, he continued his interview work and set up the Taiwan Oral History Research Chamber in the United States, publishing Memoirs of Chen Yisong, Memoirs of Zhu Zhaoyang, Memoirs of Yang Jiquan, Memoirs of Liu Shenglie, Memoirs of Liao Qinfu, and Memoirs of Gao Yushu. Over a period of ten years, Lin Zhongsheng made the selections and wrote while his dear wife Wu Junying made the recordings, leaving a valuable history of local Taiwanese personages that is both admirable and of profound cultural significance.
In the preface to the book, Lin Zhongsheng recalls his impression of my father at the time of the interviews: “Distinguished and dignified, gentle and polite in manner and elegant and refined in speech, he had about him the air of a high-ranking minister of old.… Regrettably, life has its vicissitudes: I left the Institute of Modern History nearly twenty years ago, and now the interviews with him are soon going to be published so I am again proofreading the manuscript. Both Mr. Chi Shiying and Mr. Shen Yunlong have passed away. These wise men recede farther into the past, but the events of their day remain clear; these paragons of the older generation remain imprinted on my heart. I deeply believe that his witness contains the element of the truth in this otherwise tumultuous and contentious age.” In the preface he also su
ccinctly mentions how when the mainland fell and the government came to Taiwan, Mr. Chi not only brought his work in the northeast to a close, but “was even forced out of the government’s party to which he was prepared to give his life, no doubt affecting him profoundly. Only his poise and magnanimity allowed him to remain cool and composed.” Unfortunately, at the time of the interviews, the Chinese Democratic Party my father and Lei Zhan, Li Wanju, Xia Taosheng, and Gao Yushu had planned to organize, which adhered to his ideals and held fast to his principles, with a sincere faith in the concepts of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, had not come to fruition. The freedom and democracy that my father, Guo Yuxin, Wu Sanlian, and Xu Shixian spent their whole lives trying to sow were not mentioned at the time of the interviews.
These various misgivings and regrets were probably the reason the interviews were not published during my father’s lifetime. He made sacrifices and contributions his entire life; most of the time he was unable to return home. Neither was he one to care at all about glory and rank, and he never acted out of concern for the comfort of his wife or children. Before he passed away, he felt his life had been deficient or a loss, all he had worked for having been swept away, and so there was no point in leaving any traces. There was no need for Academia Sinica to publish the interviews; it was better to forget and be forgotten by the world.
Not one word is devoted to the political situation in Taiwan in the section about his life after leaving the mainland and on relations with Japan, titled “Tearfully I Flew to Taiwan”; it ends with his attendance of the funeral ceremony for Yoshida Shigeru in 1967. Fortunately, Liang Surong wrote a piece entitled “Chi Shiying in the Legislative Yuan” for the book. Not only does he recall the friendship among revolutionary comrades but also he describes in detail my father’s relationship with the KMT, and even the situation in the Legislative Yuan just after they arrived in Taiwan. “He was a man of upright character, who made contributions to the party and the nation. An extreme idealist … in the bitter struggle, he was unyielding and uncompromising. I understood him most deeply and learned from him the longest.”
When the publication of the book was nearing, I was teaching advanced English at NTU. History graduates Li Xiaoti and Chen Qiukun, who had graduated with Ph.D.s in history from Harvard and Stanford respectively, were both researchers in the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica. They helped me to proofread the book and made some suggestions. Xiaoti accompanied me to interview Kang Ningxiang, who was running the Capital Daily News. In 1972, he was among the first group of Taiwanese elected to the Legislative Yuan, and he became a good friend of my father’s despite the difference in age—at the time he was in his thirties and my father was seventy-three. For a period of more than seven years, he came to the house in Neihu two weekends a month to eat my mother’s home-cooked dishes and to talk contentedly over drinks. When I visited him, he started off by saying, “I’ve always wanted to go on record about my relationship with your father, his relationship with the older generation in Taiwan politics, and his concern for democratic government.” That day Xiaoti made an excellent recording for what was to be titled “In Memory of Chi Shiying, a Sower of Democracy.”
My father didn’t talk about what he did for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law after arriving in Taiwan, so I added a few obituaries written from different points of view from newspapers and magazines as an appendix. In this way the reader can get an objective view of his experiences in the second half of his life after coming to Taiwan, which was not only a simple extension of the idealism of the first half of his life, but rather also the fulfillment of his character. Fu Zheng, one of the founders of the Democratic Progressive Party, wrote a piece for The Journalist titled “The Last Man of Iron Will from the Northeast.” Political commentator Yu Heng wrote “In Memory of Chi Shiying: The Man and His Relationship with Modern Chinese History,” and Tian Yushi wrote “On Sealing Chi Shiying’s Coffin.” Tian Yushi had been secretary general of the Society of Four Ethical Principles established by Zhang Xueliang, which competed with the Northeast Association in which my father oversaw anti-Japanese activities in the northeast. But after the Xi’an Incident, and working in the government, Zhang developed a better understanding of my father. Very early, members of the Chi family moved from Shanxi to the northeast, and they had patience and calm, traditionally part of the Shanxi character. Tian Yushi’s piece states:
He carried on the pioneering spirit of the first people who moved from China proper to the northeast, and was influenced by the Germanic people while studying in Germany. The combination of the two qualities made him a resolute and daring soul and gave him a realistic approach in all that he did. He was enthusiastic and loyal and cool and thoughtful in all matters. Possessed of a strong will, he dedicated himself to the revolution and was untiring in struggle.… From middle age onward, he delved deeply into China’s problems with a broad-minded perspective. From beginning to end, he always traveled a rough road that grew increasingly frustrating.… But he had an attitude that “gaining fame and fortune through disloyalty is to me like floating clouds.”
The piece was not just an obituary for Chi Shiying but also a historical document about the people from the northeast who came to China proper in those days.
Another piece that was included consisted of passages selected from Ihira Naomichi’s An Appraisal of Yoshida Shigeru (Tokyo: Yomuri Shimbun, 1978) translated by Professor Lin Shuifu, under the title “Yoshida Shigeru and Chi Shiying.” It provides a detailed account of Guo Songling’s opposition to Zhang Zuolin, how he and my father met, and how they felt a strong rapport. Yoshida Shigeru was deeply disposed toward Chi Shiying’s candidness. Both men worked for their countries during the war, but in the eyes of the Japanese, Chi Shiying was a respectable enemy.
When the book was finished, I penned the acknowledgments, titled “Voice of Twenty Years,” in which I clearly state my personal views of a lifetime with my father:
At the age of twenty-seven, Father joined the newly formed KMT; at fifty-five he was stripped of party membership for going against the powers that were; the golden years of his life were spent between idealism and disillusionment. Personal gain and loss were relatively unimportant in terms of worldly affairs. However, in 1948 the northeast was engulfed in that great suffering of being lost to the enemy. Late in life, that suffering was deep in his thoughts. Guo Songling was defeated and died because the times were not ready, but why was the northeast, and all of China for that matter, so quickly abandoned? What was the main reason? The formation of the new party had nothing to do with a sense of loss, but rather came out of hope for the future.
In the acknowledgments I also look back upon Time and Tide, which resumed publication in Taiwan utilizing Song Wenming’s editorial “Learning from Adenauer’s Memoirs” written in July 1966, when the memoirs of Konrad Adenauer were being translated and serialized. This old man, who rebuilt West Germany after defeat and destruction, had experienced Germany’s defeat in two world wars and came to the painful conclusion when considering his country’s past and future: “Democratic politics is a way of thinking that has its source in acknowledging the dignity and value and inalienable rights of the individual.” Song Wenming wrote: “Although this sounds very plain and simple, within the actual context of German politics, each word and each sentence represent the blood of millions, the tears of tens of millions, and the sufferings and hardships of hundreds of millions.” This basic but utterly constant political ideal was the heartfelt aspiration of my father from his student days until the day he was buried in Taiwan.
When he was alive he often said that since coming to Taiwan a lot of people were still hotly pursuing unimportant things like power and influence. He had extricated himself from that framework to seek and obtain freedom. Even though the novelty of revolution had worn off, he still scrupulously did his duty as a scholar, and with his cohorts in the Reform Club of the Legislative Yuan, promoted bills to strengthen the democratic rule of law,
such as the publishing law, freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, a system of judicial scheduling, defense lawyer as an established profession, and guaranteeing human rights, all of which were considered in terms of their benefit to the people. Other things, such as establishing the National Library, the printing of the bulletins and records of the Legislative Yuan, the archiving of records for the reference of the people … all had immense significance in the political history of China but were not the result of his labors alone. In the first half of his life, he experienced violent storms. He respected Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition and his achievements in the War of Resistance against Japan and didn’t have to say anything about the current situation in the “little Chang’an.”
On October 4, 1999, my father’s childhood friend Chen Hongzheng initiated and Liang Surong organized an offering ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chi Shiying at the Alumni Building at NTU. Chen Hongzheng was a successful businessman and had always been concerned about democracy, human rights, and culture. He understood my father and warmly proposed this idea for a ceremony. On the chosen day, in addition to the teachers and students and old friends, there were many politicians of divergent views present. The venue was packed. Chen Lifu, one of my father’s old friends from the revolution, insisted on being there despite being close to 100 years old, because he had “a few words to say.” When he arrived, the place was so packed there was no room to walk and he almost had to be carried to the front row, where he stood and spoke, saying that the revolutionary feeling of fifty years before and Chi Shiying’s uprightness and straightforwardness, along with the strength of his character in politics, were admirable. He understood the depths of my father’s feelings for the northeast and the sorrow at the loss of his homeland.
The Great Flowing River Page 46